New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 4, 1 (June, 2002): 5-29.

LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD:THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SIKHISM

TONY BALLANTYNE1

University of Otago

The study of the Sikh past is deeply conflicted, riven by polemics over theboundaries of the community, debates over the transformations enacted bycolonialism and migration beyond India, and heated exchanges over the statusof the discipline of history itself as a way of understanding Sikh communitiesand their experiences. While Sikh studies does not possess the lengthygenealogy that characterises the study of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, doesnot receive the media attention afforded Islamic studies since the Rushdie affairand lacks the financial resources and institutional support that Jewish studiesenjoys in Europe and North America, it has emerged as a lively and contestedacademic field. A critical examination of Sikh studies highlights severalfundamental intellectual and political issues, allowing us to explore theencounter between faith and scholarship, the relationship between imperialismand academic disciplines, and the fundamental epistemological questions thattrouble historians.

This essay has two primary objectives. Firstly, it is an attempt to mapthe major analytical positions that dominate the historical work producedwithin the sub-discipline of Sikh studies in the hope that both the common

1 Tony Ballantyne (ajballantyne@yahoo.com), who has recently moved from the Universityof Illinois to join the Department of History, University of Otago, is the author ofOrientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2001). This article introduces issues he isexploring in his new book Entangled Pasts: Sikhism, Colonialism and Diaspora. The keyarguments developed in this essay were first presented in September 2001 to the Program inSouth Asia and Middle Eastern Studies Seminar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the Cultural Studies Group at Urbana, and the ‘Sikhism in Light of History’conference held at Ann Arbor, Michigan. Tony would like to thank Hew McLeod, AntoinetteBurton, Brian Moloughney and Sally Henderson for their responses to earlier versions ofthis paper, but notes that, as ever, the sole responsibility for the article remains with theauthor.

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ground and points of conflict within the field can be brought into stark relief.Secondly, this essay explores a series of epistemological and methodologicalproblems in order clarify the assumptions that currently govern the field andto push Sikh studies towards a more sustained engagement with a broader setof questions that are central to humanities scholarship at the dawning of thenew millennium. In forwarding a series of provisional responses to theseproblematics, this essay marks a first and hesitant step towards a vision of theSikh past that grapples with cultural encounters, the power of colonialism andthe cultural traffic that cuts across the borders of the Punjab region and theIndian nation-state.

Mapping the Field

Sikh historiography is dominated by a series of ongoing and intense debatesover important events, the veracity of key sources and the origins of certainpractices. Many of these exchanges are of great intellectual and culturalsignificance for Sikhs, especially where the origins of Sikhism, the compositionand provenance of key texts (most notably the Adi Granth and DasamGranth), and key markers of Sikh identity (such as the ‘five Ks’ and turban(pagri)) are concerned.2 Robust exchanges over such issues absorb much ofthe energy of scholars working on the Sikh past and as a result there havebeen relatively few attempts to explore the fundamental assumptions thatshape Sikh studies. Those that do exist, typically either present a narrative ofthe sub-discipline’s development or explore the supposedly fundamental riftsbetween ‘western critical scholarship’ and understandings of the Sikh pastproduced from within Sikh communities.3 Here I adopt another strategy, amore schematic approach that charts the shape of the field, identifying avariety of analytical positions that are differentiated by their fundamentalunderstanding of the shape of Sikh history, their epistemological frameworks,and the methodologies they deploy.

It is possible to identify five divergent approaches to the Sikh past – theinternalist, the Khalsacentric, the regional, the externalist and the diasporic. Thefollowing discussion of this five-fold typology, which also highlights important 2 The five ks, panj kakar in Punjabi, are the external markers of identity that are associatedwith the Sikhs of the Khalsa (the militarised order instituted by the tenth Guru, GobindSingh, in 1699).3 E.g. Gianeshwar Khurana, British historiography on the Sikh Power in the Punjab(London, 1985); Darshan Singh, Western Image of Sikh Religion (Delhi, 1999); Fauja Singhed., Historians and Historiography of the Sikhs (Delhi, 1978); Trilochan Singh, ErnestTrumpp and W.H. McLeod as Scholars of Sikh History, Religion and culture (Chandigarh,1994). J. S. Grewal’s Contesting Interpretations of the Sikh Tradition (Delhi, 1999) markssomething of a break with this tradition.

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variations within each position, undercuts the easy oppositions and binary logicthat shapes the opposition between ‘Khalsacentric’ and ‘Eurocentric’approaches to the Sikh past drawn recently by critics of ‘western criticalscholarship’. Such a typology also marks a significant refinement of thesimple opposition between ‘internalist’ and ‘externalist’ approaches to Sikhhistory that I have highlighted elsewhere.4

Internalist Approaches: Normative, Textual, Political and Cultural

The first of these five analytical traditions is what I have termed the‘internalist’ approach, a method that dominates Sikh historiography. Despitethe significant methodological, epistemological and political differences we canidentify as marking four distinct versions of this internalist scholarship(normative, textualist, political, and cultural), those working within theinternalist tradition are united by a common analytical orientation. Internalistscholars prioritise the internal development of Sikh ‘tradition’, rather than thebroader regional, political and cultural forces that shape the community fromthe outside.

The oldest of these traditions is what we might term the ‘normativetradition’ or what Harjot Oberoi terms the ‘Tat Khalsa’ tradition. This visionof the Sikh past emerged out of the intense struggles within the Sikh Panth (lit.way; community) during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.Pamphleteers, editorialists, and social reformers forwarded conflicting visionsof the boundaries of the community and the Panth’s development in the hopethat by clearly defining the community’s past they would be able to cementtheir own vision of the community’s present and future.5 History writing wasa crucial tool for the rival factions of the Singh Sabha movement, whichflourished throughout Punjab after it was initially established in Amritsar(1873) and Lahore (1879). The so-called Sanatan faction insisted that theirpractices were in keeping both with Sikh custom and what they imagined asthe ancient, even eternal, devotional practices of north Indian Hindus.Sanatanis frequently saw the Gurus as avatars of Ram and Krishna,worshipped images and idols, and accepted the varnasramadharma, theparadigmatic Brahmanical view of the centrality of the four-fold divisions ofvarna (caste) and asrama (stage of life) in shaping an individual’s identity andobligations. On the other hand, the modernist Tat Khalsa faction of the SinghSabha advocated a clearly delineated Sikh identity and used historical writingto argue that Sikhism was a religious tradition entirely independent from

4 Tony Ballantyne, ‘Resisting the “Boa Constrictor” of Hinduism: the Khalsa and the Raj’,International Journal of Punjab Studies 6:2 (1999), 195-215.5 The best guide to these exchanges is N. Gerald Barrier, The Sikhs and Their Literature: aguide to tracts, books, and periodicals, 1849-1919 (Delhi, 1970).

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Hinduism. Most famously, Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha proclaimed in his 1898pamphlet ‘ham hindu nahin’: we are not Hindus. Nabha’s pamphlet, likeother texts produced by Tat Khalsa ideologues, was simultaneously an attackon the power of the Hindu reformers of the Arya Samaj in Punjab and also aresponse to the Sanatan tradition that remained popular with older Sikhs andthe rural masses. These Tat Khalsa reformers rejected Urdu as a medium foreducation and administration, proclaiming that the Punjabi language written inthe Gurmukhi script, the very script used in the Adi Granth, was the languageof Punjab. While they battled the threat of Islamicization they saw as beingembodied in Urdu’s dominance, they also crafted a complex series of life cyclerituals that marked them off from Punjabi Hindus. Tat Khalsa leaders insistedthat Sikhs were a distinct and self-sufficient community and this belief wasarticulated most clearly when the Chief Khalsa Diwan informed the GovernorGeneral in 1888 that Sikhs should not be ‘confounded with Hindus but treatedin all respects as a separate community.’6

To inscribe a firm boundary between Sikhs and Hindus, historical textsproduced by Tat Khalsa historians rested on two narrative strategies. Firstly,they evoked ideal types, historical role models who embodied the ideals of theKhalsa. Suspicious of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s piety and morality andunsettled by Dalip Singh’s conversion to Christianity, they looked back to amore distant Sikh past, a past untainted by colonialism, for properly Sikhheroes. The heroic martyrdom of the ninth Guru (Tegh Bahadur) and themartial spirit of the tenth, Gobind Singh, served as exemplary models, as didthe great protector of the fledgling Khalsa, Banda Singh Bahadur. Theseheroes and martyrs devoted their lives to the faith and the promulgation of adistinctive Sikh identity in the face of Mughal oppression and Tat Khalsahistorians enjoined their contemporaries to do the same.7

Following on from this, the second key element of Tat Khalsa historicalnarratives was an insistence on the dangers posed by Hinduism.8 Like manyBritish administrators, Tat Khalsa reformers conceived of Hinduism, especiallyin its popular forms, as an all-consuming jungle or a boa constrictor capable ofcrushing and consuming religious innovation through its stifling weight andincessant expansion. The efforts of Hindu reformers and the laxity ofuneducated Sikhs not only blurred the boundaries of the community, but alsothreatened the very future of Sikhism. Only a return to teachings of the Adi 6 Bhagat Lakshman Singh, Autobiography Ganda Singh ed., (Calcutta, 1965), 58.7 Some of these traditions are explored in the work of Lou Fenech on martyrdom in Sikhtradition. See n. 16 below.8 It is important to note that ‘Hinduism’ itself is a problematic term in the South Asiancontext. The product of the Orientalist study of South Asian textual traditions and thesociological knowledge produced by the colonial state, there is no equivalent term for‘Hinduism’ in any pre-colonial South Asian language. Nevertheless, during in thenineteenth century the term was adopted by a variety of South Asian leaders, especially thosewriting in English.

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Granth and the strict maintenance of the rahit (code of conduct), wouldprevent Hinduism from engulfing Sikhism altogether.9

This normative tradition of historical writing was consolidated in theearly twentieth century by the likes of Bhai Vir Singh and after Partition it wasincreasingly professionalised by a new generation of scholars, most notablyGanda Singh and Harbans Singh. Both of these authors wrote what we mightterm ‘corrective histories’, works that challenged interpretations of Sikhismpopular outside the community (such as the belief that Nanak’s teachings wereessentially syncretistic) and disputed evidence that indicated diversity in Sikhidentity and practice within the historical record. This corrective approach ismost obvious in Ganda Singh’s edited collection of European accounts ofSikhism, where his glosses and footnotes not only correct Europeanmisapprehensions, but also rebut European claims that Sikhs engaged inpractices that contravened the injunctions of the rahit.10

In the late 1960s this normative tradition faced its first serious challengewith the publication of W. H. McLeod’s Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion.McLeod, who quickly established himself as the most influential modernhistorian of Sikhism. McLeod introduced a new methodological rigour andinterpretive strategy into the study of the Sikh past: textual criticism.Published in 1968, one year before the quincentennial of Nanak’s birth,McLeod’s Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion was at odds with the reverentialand even hagiographical tone of the numerous volumes that marked thisimportant celebration. McLeod’s book was not a celebration of the Nanak offaith, but rather a critical assessment of what we know about ‘the man GuruNanak’.11 Taking the janam-sakhis, the life stories of Nanak that circulatedamongst his followers, as his sources, McLeod set about evaluating thereliability of each sakhi or gost (chapter). On the basis of miraculous content,the existence of corroborating external sources including the Adi Granth,agreement between different janam-sakhis, and genealogical and geographicalevidence, McLeod placed each narrative into one of five categories: theestablished, the probable, the possible, the improbable, and the impossible.12

According to this typology many treasured narratives – such as theyoung Nanak’s restoration of a field of wheat ruined by buffaloes – werediscounted entirely, others were dismissed as improbable, while others stillwere identified as merely possible: McLeod placed 87 out of 124 sakhis inthese categories. The remaining thirty-seven McLeod accepted as eitherprobable or as established on the basis of corroborating evidence. From thesesources, McLeod reconstructed the life of Nanak: after his meticulous readingof each sakhi and careful weighing of evidence, he produced an account of

9 Ballantyne, ‘Resisting the “Boa Constrictor”’.10 Ganda Singh, Early European Accounts of the Sikhs (Delhi, 1964).11 W. H. McLeod, Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion (Oxford, 1968), vii.12 Ibid., 68-70.

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Nanak’s life – ‘everything of any importance which can be affirmedconcerning the events of Guru Nanak’s life’ – in just three short paragraphs.He insisted that in ‘the janam-sakhis what we find is the Guru Nanak of legendand of faith, the image of the Guru seen through the eyes of popular pietyseventy-five or a hundred years after his death’. The janam-sakhis, McLeodinsisted, ‘provide only glimpses’ of the historical Nanak.13

McLeod’s critical reappraisal of the historical Nanak in Guru Nanak andthe Sikh Religion proved highly controversial (even while his summary ofNanak’s teachings was widely accepted as a clear and accurate explication)and it established the key features of a textualist approach to the Sikh past.There are four key features of this analytical strategy that are worthunderlining. Firstly, even though McLeod has produced an extremelyimportant volume on bazaar prints and Sikh popular culture, his fundamentalapproach is empirical and exhibits a deep-concern with establishing the ‘facts’of the Sikh past. Secondly, his method is grounded in careful source criticism,paying close attention to the provenance of particular texts and therelationships between texts. Thirdly, philology is central in his analysis, as heassiduously attends to questions of meaning, translation, and linguistic history.Fourthly, taking his substantial oeuvre as a whole (and while recognizing hissignificant pioneering contributions in the study of gender and diaspora), thereal focus of McLeod’s work is the period prior to western intrusion and therise of Ranjit Singh and he is primarily interested in the development of textualtraditions and the internal dynamics of the community.

McLeod’s textualist approach transformed understandings of Sikhhistory and established a new analytical framework that has been extended bya younger generation of scholars. Where McLeod has focused largely on thejanam-sakhis and rahit-namas, two recent works have focused on the core‘scripture’ of the Sikhs, the Adi Granth. Pashaura Singh’s meticulous yetcontroversial The Guru Granth Sahib: Canon, Meaning and Authorityscrutinized the production of the Adi Granth, its canonization as ‘scripture’,and explored the ways in which the relationship between Sikhs and the AdiGranth have changed over time.14 Gurinder Singh Mann’s The Making ofSikh Scripture drew on recently discovered manuscripts in order to offer abrief yet broad vision of the development of Sikh scripture, extending andmodifying McLeod’s explorations of the making of the core Sikh textualtradition.15

Lou Fenech’s recent monograph on the place of martyrdom in Sikhhistory works within the textualist approach pioneered by McLeod, but haspushed it in an important new direction as he used textual analysis to explorethe development of a distinctive Sikh cultural tradition focussed on the figure 13 Ibid., 146-7.14 Pashaura Singh, The Guru Granth Sahib: canon, meaning and authority (Delhi, 2000).15 Gurinder Singh Mann, The Making of Sikh Scripture (New York, 2001).

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of the shahid (martyr). By reading culture through textual analysis Fenech’swork, to a greater extent than that of McLeod, Gurinder Singh Mann orPashaura Singh, marks a sustained engagement with neglected culturalquestions, such as literary expression, popular culture and the workings ofcommunity memory over the broad sweep of Sikh history.16 Like Fenech,Jeevan Deol’s work is deeply concerned with literary expression and his essaysto date fruitfully explore a number of theoretical issues related to narrative anddiscourse while returning Sikh texts and history to a wider Punjabi culturalfield.17

A third variant of the internalist approach can be identified in the workof historians of Sikh politics. Most notable here is the work of N.G. Barrier.One of the leading specialists on Sikh history in the colonial era, Barrier’swork in the 1970s explored broader aspects of Punjabi administration andpolitics before the rise of Gandhi and his more recent work on Sikh politicsremains highly cogniscent of both this regional context and the power of thecolonial state. Unlike the textualist approach, Barrier foregrounds communitymobilisation and access to political power, providing valuable insights into theinstitutions, power structures, and internal struggles that have shaped Sikhpolitics in the last 150 years, both in Punjab and beyond.18 His current workon institutional and textual authority within a global Sikh community promisesto create a paradigmatic and nuanced analysis of recent Sikh politics, filling agaping hole in the scholarly literature on Sikhism.

While Barrier’s work has been central in shaping our understanding ofSikh politics in the colonial era, Harjot Oberoi has produced the mostsophisticated cultural analysis of social change in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. Oberoi’s critics have frequently identified him as amember of a ‘McLeodian school’, failing to recognise the fundamentalepistemological and methodological break that Oberoi’s work makes from thetextualist tradition and McLeod’s strict empiricism. Although Oberoi’s TheConstruction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in theSikh Tradition notes that ‘the field of modern Sikh studies has for long been

16 Louis E. Fenech, Martyrdom in the Sikh Tradition: playing the 'game of love' (New Delhi,2000).17 Jeevan Deol, ‘Eighteenth Century Khalsa Identity: Discourse, Praxis and Narrative’, SikhReligion, Culture and Ethnicity Christopher Shackle, Gurharpal Singh & Arvind-pal SinghMandair eds., (Richmond, 2001), 25-46; ‘The Minas and Their Literature’, Journal of theAmerican Oriental Society 118:2 (1998), 172-184; ‘Surdas: Poet and Text in the SikhTradition’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 63:2 (2000), 169-193;‘“To Hell With War”: Literature of Political Resistance in early Nineteenth CenturyPunjab’, South Asia Research 17:2 (1997), 178-209.18 See, for example, N.G. Barrier, ‘The Formulation and Enactment of the Punjab Alienationof Land Bill’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 2:2 (1965), 145-165; ‘MassPolitics and the Punjab Congress in the Pre-Gandhian Era’, Journal of Indian History50:149, (1972), 459-470.

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nurtured by the writings of Professor W.H. McLeod’ and acknowledges an‘enormous debt’ to McLeod, his analytical framework is an entirely originalone, at least within the context of Sikh studies.19 The very title of the workwhich foregrounds the construction of Sikh identity signals an important shiftaway from empiricism towards a social constructivist approach. This ruptureis also confirmed by Oberoi’s epigram, taken from Tzvetan Todorov’sdiscussion of the openness and multiplicity of historical narratives in Todorov’slandmark The Conquest of America, a quotation that underlines Oberoi’s keeninterest in the production of narratives and discourses and their culturalpower.20 Oberoi cast a wide theoretical net: drawing both from the classicalsociology of religion (Durkheim, Weber and Evans-Pritchard) through toFoucault’s work on the shifting epistemological foundations of knowledge-construction. If these theoretical interests mark The Construction of ReligiousBoundaries off from the tradition pioneered by McLeod, so too does Oberoi’sinterest in the centrality of colonialism. Although his work covers a hugegeographical and temporal terrain, McLeod’s most detailed research exploresthe period up to the middle of the eighteenth century and it resolutely focuseson transformations that were driven from within the community. Oberoiinstead focuses on the period between 1849 and 1920, recounting the birth ofa new Sikh episteme under colonialism. It is important to note that for Oberoi,this crucial shift was not the direct result of British rule, but rather the social,economic, and cultural reconfigurations of colonialism created the conditionsfor this momentous reshaping of Sikh intellectual and cultural life. It is againstthis colonial background that Oberoi reconstructs the role of indigenous elitesand propagandists in the reordering of indigenous identity along communallines.

Oberoi detailed the clash between the Sanatan tradition and thesystematised religious vision of the Tat Khalsa, a modernist vision thatinscribed clear lines between Sikhs and other communities by insisting on themaintenance of a cluster of new rituals and social practices as markers ofcommunity. In short, The Construction of Religious Boundaries documentedthe undermining of an ‘enchanted universe’ of popular religious syncretism inthe villages of the Punjab by a highly ordered pattern of practice and clearlydelineated Sikh (‘Tat Khalsa’) identity formulated in the province’s urbancentres and disseminated through print culture, community organizations andsustained proselytization.

19 Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: culture, identity and diversityin the Sikh tradition (Delhi, 1994), xii.20 Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: the question of the other Richard Howardtrans., (New York, 1984).

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Khalsacentrism and History

The Construction of Religious Boundaries pushed Sikh studies in a newdirection, stimulating an analytical reorientation that was strongly resisted bymany conservative Sikhs. The book and its author became targets of fiercepolemics. In the introduction to their The Invasion of Religious Boundaries, asustained rebuttal of The Construction of Religious Boundaries, Jasbir SinghMann, Surinder Singh Sodhi and Gurbakhsh Singh Gill characterised Oberoi’swork in the following way:

Clumsy distortions, mindless anthropological constructions andassumptions, producing ignominious forged postures, sacrilegiousstatements about mystic Gurus, effectless effort of a bland,blunted, unattached, constricted, shallow, pathetic Oberoi hasproduced a disjointed cynical, conscienceless and unscrupulousbook … to attack the independent Sikh Identity … In writing thisbook, he has shown his pathological identification withEurocentric paradigms, and has attempted to bring nihilisticdepersonalisation by biting the hands that fed him.21

Elsewhere in the Invasion of Religious Boundaries, Sodhi and Mann arguethat ‘Oberoi has become prisoner of [the] McLeodian Eurocentric researchparadigm.’22

To counter ‘western critical scholarship’, Mann, Sodhi and Gill advocatethe adoption of a Khalsacentric approach to the Sikh past. Although thisapproach shares some fundamental assumptions about the primacy ofdevelopments within the community with the internalist visions of Sikh historydescribed above, the thoroughness of its critique of ‘western’ understandingsof Sikhism and disciplinary knowledge sets it apart. Sodhi, for example, insiststhat Khalsacentric research eschews ‘the use of European social sciencemethods’ and instead grounds scholarship in a belief ‘in essence, wholism [sic],introspection’ and that, as a result, Khalsacentric scholarship describes ‘Sikhrealities from a subjective faith point of view of the Khalsa values and ideals’.23

While, at an important level, this approach exhibits the same deepconcern with the maintenance of a prescriptive normative order that typifiedthe older Tat Khalsa tradition, Khalsacentric scholarship is characterised by itsthorough rejection of ‘western critical scholarship’. Where the Tat Khalsatradition developed out of an urbanized late nineteenth century Punjabi elitethat was receptive towards colonial education and western disciplines, the

21 Jasbir Singh Mann, Surinder Singh Sodhi and Gurbakhsh Singh Gill, ‘Introduction’,Invasion of Religious Boundaries: a critique of Harjot Oberoi’s work (Vancouver, n.d.), 1.22 S.S. Sodhi and J.S. Mann, ‘Construction of Religious Boundaries’, ibid., 167.23 S.S. Sodhi, ‘Eurocentrism vs. Khalsacentrism’, ibid, 342.

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Khalsacentric tradition repudiates the authority claims of disciplines likehistory, sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, and religious studies.Gurdarshan Singh Dhillon, for example, has asserted that ‘a proper study ofreligion … is beyond the domain of Sociology, Anthropology and History’,while Sukhmander Singh has argued that ‘[m]ethodologies relevant toChristian ideology where scriptures developed as a result of history andculture, [are] inapplicable to Sikhism where scripture is revelatory andauthenticated by the prophet himself.’24 It follows on from this that Sikhismcan only be understood from a ‘scriptural’ basis:

As Sikhism is not a history grounded religion, the application ofJudo-Christian [sic] principles in Sikh studies will bring about thewrong results. Sikhism is not a product of history. Rather, theSikh thought is its cause, and the historical events that followed,represent the unfolding of the philosophy preached by the Gurus,and enshrined in Sri Guru Granth Sahib.25

This rejection of western disciplines is energized by the social concerns of aconservative section of a transnational Sikh elite, many of whom areprofessionals based in North America, anxious about the maintenance oftradition in a diasporic age. Although the Khalsacentric model has drawnsome support from non-Sikh scholars, most notably Noel King, it is enabledby a nativist politics that simply rejects the authority of non-Sikh scholars anddismisses many professional Sikh historians in ad hominem attacks as ‘brain-washed’, ‘role-dancing’ or ‘fallen’.26

It is important to recognise that Khalsacentric critiques of westernscholarship are partly motivated by a legitimate concern about the colonialorigins and the Eurocentric freight of many academic disciplines. TheKhalsacentric refutation of ‘western knowledge’ rests upon the supposedmaterialism of all western scholarship (an assertion that seems dubious in thewake of post-structuralism, post-modernism, gender studies and the linguisticturn) and an engagement, albeit a scant and seemingly haphazard one, with thework of Edward Said, Talal Asad and other critics of Orientalism.27 Given 24 Gurdarshan Singh Dhillon, ‘Review of The Construction of Religious Boundaries’, SikhPress, 4:33 (May 1994), 4; Sukhmander Singh, ‘A Work of Scholarly Indulgence’,Invasion of Religious Boundaries – a critique of Harjot Oberoi’s work Jasbir Singh Mann,Surinder Singh Sodhi and Gurbaksh Singh Gill eds., (Vancouver, 1995), 257.25 Mann, Sodhi and Gill, ‘Introduction’, ibid., 7-8.26 Noel Q. King, ‘“Modernity”, “Fundamentalism” and Sikhism: a tertium quid’, Invasionof Religious Boundaries, 106-111; ‘The Siege Perilous (Hot Seat) and the divineHypothesis’, ibid., 11-116; ‘Capax imperii – Scripture, Tradition and European style criticalmethod’, Advanced Studies in Sikhism Jasbir Singh Mann and Harbans Singh Saraon eds.,(Irvine, CA, 1989), 3-15.27 E.g. Mann, Sodhi, and Gill, ‘Introduction’, 3.

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this, however, it is ironic that the Khalsacentric critique of ‘westernknowledge’ replicates the binary logic that structured the most perniciousforms of colonial discourse, merely reversing the moral and political valueattached to spirituality as opposed to science, tradition to modernity, faith toscholarship.

Khalsacentrism is, fundamentally, an ‘Occidentalising’ discourse thatcaricatures western culture and academic disciplines in an effort to insulate thecommunity from the ‘invasive’ effects of professional scholarship and toenable the construction of an autonomous, self-contained and privilegedinterpretative tradition within the community. Not surprisingly, Khalsacentricdiscourse replicates many of the arguments made by the Hindu right against‘western scholarship’ and the ‘historical religions’ of the ‘West’, whilesimultaneously closing down debates about history and identity with‘outsiders’.28 At a fundamental level, such arguments merely reinforce long-established Orientalist stereotypes of South Asia as a land of unchanging andeternal spirituality, the very tradition that much recent post-Orientalistscholarship on South Asian has been working against.29

Yet, there is much to admire in Sodhi’s exposition of a program forKhalsacentric scholarship, particularly his insistence that as an approach it isgrounded in ‘humanistic and emancipatory anti-racist awareness’ and that will‘screen out oppressive assumptions’.30 But on the basis of the work producedby Khalsacentric scholars to date, there seems to be the likely possibility thatthis model may itself create and enforce ‘oppressive assumptions’, a likelihoodthat seems very real in light of the polemics against the personality, morals andfamilies of Harjot Oberoi, Hew McLeod, Pashaura Singh and others. Byinsisting that scholarship be should be produced from within the Khalsa andshould affirm its values and program, this approach to the Sikh past calls intoquestion the faith and identity of those Sikhs who do not accept all of thepractices and identity markers of the Khalsa. This is clear, for example, in thework of Manjeet Singh Sidhu, who dubbed Oberoi a ‘mendacious gleaner’and dismissed the Sanatan faction of the Singh Sabha as ‘Hindu saboteurs’and ‘conspiratorial and peripheral Sanatan Sikhs’.31 Used in this way,Khalsacentrism can only reify community boundaries, disempower non-Khalsa 28 Just as the popular journal Hinduism Today declared that ‘history is always inaccurateand often injurious. The good news is that India and Hinduism live beyond history’, Sodhi,Mann and Gill argued that ‘[t]he Sikh religion or its identity cannot be studied with suchparameters as are applied to Judeo-Christian studies … as their religion and scriptures, whichnumbering over 60, make it a history grounded religion’ where ‘Sikhism is not the productof history’. ‘Introduction’, 7; Hinduism Today, 16 (December, 1994).29 On the possibilities of a ‘post-orientalist’ history see Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal,Modern South Asia: history, culture, and political economy (London, 1998).30 S.S. Sodhi, ‘Eurocentrism vs. Khalsacentrism’, 342-3.31 Manjeet Singh Sandhu, ‘Harjot Oberoi - Scholar or saboteur’, Invasion of ReligiousBoundaries, 192-3.

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Sikhs and prevent the possibility of any positive dialogue with other SouthAsian religious communities or with non-Sikh scholars.

Regional Approaches: Sikhism in its Punjabi Context

While these internalist models often recognise that the Sikh community hasbeen moulded by the broader structures, institutions and cultural patterns ofPunjabi life (even in the diasporic context), they share a tendency to abstractSikhism from this crucial regional context.32 At a fundamental level, of course,this is a product of the Tat Khalsa insistence on the originality, internalcoherence, and incomparability of Sikh tradition. As a result, internalscholarship tends to privilege religious identity over social and commercialaffiliations or regional identity and Sikhism is extracted from the dense webs ofeconomics, social relations, and political traditions that have moulded itsdevelopment in Punjab and beyond.

Several historians break with the internalist tradition through theirexplicit emphasis on the importance of this regional context. Indu Banga,whose writings cover the late eighteenth century through to the twentieth, hasconsistently foregrounded the importance of Punjab as a context. In part, thisseems to be a product of her groundbreaking work on Ranjit Singh’skingdom, a state that is frequently imagined as being explicitly Sikh, yet restedupon the Maharaja’s skilful balancing of different faiths and ethnicities in bothhis administration and military establishment. Banga’s emphasis on theimportance of the regional context also reflects her strong interest in theeconomic and agrarian history of the region, the crucial milieu within whichSikhism emerged and developed.33

J. S. Grewal has consistently grounded his explorations of Sikhism in thehistory of Punjab. Of all the historians working on Sikhism, Grewal haspublished the most widely on Punjabi history more generally and his researchconsistently foregrounds the importance of the region’s geography, itsinstitutions and political structures, its economic fortunes and its cultural ethos.In light of this insistence, his work typically uses a broader range of sourcesand deploys a range of approaches – from literary analysis to discussions ofpolitical economy – in teasing out the multi-faceted nature of Sikh history.For Grewal, Sikh history is a dynamic story of the shifting relationship

32 This tendency varies between approaches and individual historians: it is much morepronounced in the Tat Khalsa normative tradition than in the political approach of Barrier orthe cultural history produced by Oberoi.33 Indu Banga, Agrarian System of the Sikhs: late eighteenth and early nineteenth century(Delhi, 1978); edited with J.S. Grewal, Maharaja Ranjit Singh and His Times (Amritsar,1980); ‘Agrarian System in Punjab during Sikh Rule’, History of Agriculture 2:1 (1980),35-65.

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between this community and its regional environment. It is telling that therecent festschrift for Grewal was entitled Five Punjabi Centuries: policy,economy, society, and culture34

For the colonial period, the work of Kenneth W. Jones firmly locatedSikh debates over identity and Sikh socio-religious reform movements within awider regional and national context.35 His landmark 1973 Journal of AsianStudies article on Arya Samaji-Singh Sabha relations located the articulation ofan increasing clearly defined Sikh identity within the broader context ofeducational change, urbanization, and class formation in Punjab.36 For Jones,it was clear that the religious reform and the definition of clear-cut boundariesbetween Hindus and Sikhs was not only the product of the encountersbetween the communities, but was also the result of struggles within thecommunity between newly-powerful urban elites and the older ‘orthodoxworld’ of rural life. Although Jones’s exploration of these struggles within theSikh community have been elaborated and refined by Oberoi, there has beenlimited effort to extend his pioneering work on the relationship between AryaSamajis and Singh Sabha reformers. Anil Sethi’s recent Cambridge PhDthesis provides some insight into this process within his broader analysis of thechanging operation of community boundaries in key spheres of Punjabipopular culture and daily life, including commensality, festivals and popularentertainment.37

Externalist Approaches: Sikh Identity as a Colonial Product

A smaller group of historians have privileged imperial power relations overregional structures as they emphasise the centrality of colonialism in themaking of Sikhism. This approach is most obvious in Richard Fox’s Lions ofthe Punjab, which argued that the British played a central role in constitutingthe orthodox ‘Singh’ [i.e. Khalsa] identity as they hoped a distinctive and loyalSikh soldiery would form a bulwark to British authority.38 In short, Foxsuggested that the British pursued a project of ‘domestication’, as they used

34 Indu Banga ed., Five Punjabi Centuries: policy, economy, society, and culture, c. 1500-1990: essays for J.S. Grewal (New Delhi, 1997).35 Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-Religious Reform Movements in British India (Cambridge,1990); Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages(Albany, 1992).36 Kenneth W. Jones, ‘Ham Hindu Nahin: Arya-Sikh Relations, 1877-1905’, Journal ofAsian Studies, 32:3 (1973), 457-475. Also see his earlier ‘Communalism in the Punjab: theArya Samaj contribution’, Journal of Asian Studies 28:1 (1968), 39-54.37 Anil Sethi, ‘The Creation of Religious Identities in the Punjab, c.1850-1920’, (Universityof Cambridge Ph.D. 1998).38 Oberoi’s arguments in The Construction of Religious Boundaries can be read as anextended response to Fox’s work.

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military recruitment ‘to turn the Singhs into guardians of the Raj’ while using‘Sikhism’s religious institutions to discipline them [Sikh soldiers] toobedience.’39 Through the mechanism of the ‘martial races’ policy the Britishwere thus instrumental in the constitution of a new ‘orthodoxy’, a religiousidentity that fulfilled the needs of the British, not Punjabis themselves.Although Fox suggests that ‘antecedent conditions of class relations andreligious identities set the material and cultural limits for the making … of thePunjab’s culture’, his monograph foregrounds the instrumentality of thecolonial state and fails to acknowledge the significance of pre-colonialstructures, practices, and identities.40 Thus, in contrast to the long dominantinternalist historiographical tradition, Fox’s work was characterised by an‘externalist’ approach. In stressing the pivotal role of British culturalassumptions and the mechanisms of the colonial state in the creation ofmodern Sikh identity, Fox effectively relocated the drive-wheel of historicalchange from within the Sikh community to British offices, libraries and drill-halls. Fox’s work challenged the tendency to treat the Sikh community asself-contained, underlining the transformative power of colonialism andidentifying colonial rule as the major rupture in Punjabi history.

Bernard Cohn developed similar arguments in his important essay onthe symbolic and political importance of clothing, including the Sikh turban, inSouth Asian society. Cohn argues that the ‘British rulers in nineteenth-century India played a major part in making the turban into a salient feature ofSikh identity’. While Cohn briefly reviews Sikh history, beginning with theage-old (and erroneous) assertion that Sikhism ‘grew out of syncretictendencies in theology and worship among Hindu and Muslims in north India’,his discussion of the dastar or pagri (turban) fails to note its significance ineighteenth century texts such as the Chaupa Singh Rahit-nama and itsprominence in the ranks of Ranjit Singh’s army.41 Such evidence suggeststhat the turban had already became an important marker of identity for someSikhs, at least some Sikh men, long before the extension of the East IndiaCompany’s authority over Punjab in 1849. Certainly, Cohn is correct insuggesting that during the colonial period the turban increasingly became astandard marker of Sikh identity, but his neglect of the pre-colonial periodallows him to overplay the extent of this transformation. By privileging the 39 Richard G. Fox, Lions of the Punjab: culture in the making (Delhi, 1990), 140.40 Ibid., 207.41 Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: the British In India(Princeton, 1996), 107; The Chaupa Singh Rahit-nama W.H. McLeod (Dunedin, 1987). Thechanging place of the turban in Sikh identity is explored in W.H. McLeod, ‘The Turban:Symbol of Sikh Identity’, Sikh Identity: Continuity and Change Pashaura Singh and N.Gerald Barrier eds., (Delhi, 1999), 57-68. Elsewhere McLeod has insisted that the rahit-namas are important agents and markers of continuity between the seventeenth century andnineteenth century Panth. W.H. McLeod, Early Sikh tradition: a Study of the Janam-Sakhis(Oxford, 1980), 105.

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prescriptive power of the colonial state, Cohn also effaces the role ofindigenous reformers, especially the members of the Tat Khalsa, inpromulgating the turban as a distinctively Sikh symbol in the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries.

Thus both Cohn’s and Fox’s externalist interpretation of the genesis ofmodern Sikh identity are enabled by truncated chronological frameworkswhich effectively erase the pre-colonial period. By defining the rise of adistinct Sikh identity as the direct product of the initiatives of the colonial state,ironically these visions of Sikh history actually make it difficult to gauge theexact nature, extent and legacy of the colonial moment in Sikh history.Indeed, this story may seem very different, if the question of modern Sikhidentity was re-imagined within a broader exploration of the problem ofidentity under imperial regimes in general rather than under Britishcolonialism in particular, for then we might have a fuller understanding ofhow the imperial systems of the Mughals and Ranjit Singh dealt with theheterogeneous nature of Punjabi society. We await a study that will place thereformist zeal of the final three decades of the nineteenth century in a broadchronological context, allowing us to assess the true extent of British powerand the cultural programme of the Tat Khalsa.

Diasporic approaches: Sikhism in a global frame

The most recent approach to the Sikh past that has emerged is grounded inthe study of the Sikh community as a trans-national and diasporic socialformation. At one level, this approach grew out of an older tradition of workon Sikh (and Punjabi) immigration, such as Arthur Helweg’s sociologicalstudies of the British Sikh community and W. H. McLeod’s pioneering workon Punjabis in New Zealand.42 These early studies largely dealt with thestaples of immigration history as it developed in the 1970s and 1980s, such asthe decision to immigrate, the nature and organization of the community in its‘host country’, and questions of ‘assimilation’ and ‘acculturation’.

This immigration history paradigm has been called into questionrecently as some scholars have adopted a range of approaches that haveemerged out of the analytical problematic of ‘diaspora’. As Verne Dusenberyhas argued, this shift towards a diasporic model marked a significantreconceptualisation of the position of the Sikh community and the project ofSikh studies. Where earlier histories of Sikh communities beyond Punjab werewritten in the vein of ‘immigration history’ and as such took the ‘host nation’nation as its analytical unit, imagining a Sikh diaspora invoked a very different 42 Arthur Helweg, Sikhs in England: the development of a migrant community (Oxford,1979); W. H. McLeod, Punjabis in New Zealand: a history of Punjabi migration, 1890-1940 (Amritsar, 1986).

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model. The term ‘diaspora’, originally used to describe the Jewish experienceand well established as an analytical category in Jewish studies, suggested thatdiasporic Sikhs were a people unified by a common culture and who had beendispersed, either temporarily or permanently, from their ‘homeland’. 43 At ananalytical level, the concept of a Sikh diaspora was both promising andtroubling. In conceiving of the ‘diaspora’ itself as the analytical focus (ratherthan the Sikh community in a particular nation), the possibility of a genuinelytrans-national approach to Sikh studies was opened up, a strategy throughwhich we might not only recover the social networks, institutional structuresand cultural traffic that has linked Sikhs living overseas with the Punjab, butalso the ties that directly connect different diasporic communities (say, forexample, in Britain and Canada).

Brian Keith Axel’s recent The Nation’s Tortured Body developed arereading of the last 150 years of Sikh history through the lens of thecontemporary transnational and diasporic global Sikh community. Mostprovocatively, Axel argued that the notion of Punjab as the ‘Sikh homeland’was not something created in India and carried out into the world by migrants,but rather it was the diasporic experience of displacement that actually createdthe notion of the homeland. Axel’s transnational approach allowed him toproduce and juxtapose ethnographies and histories of a range of importantsites for various Sikh communities, ranging from Harmindar Sahib in Amritsarto Southall’s Glassy Junction pub. Not only does Axel return these ‘local’sites to the broader field of the diaspora, he also examines the ways in whichthese various sites and communities are connected. He makes a convincingcase that it is the circulation of images of the male Sikh body – with MaharajaDalip Singh serving as the exemplary case – that mediate between far-flungSikh communities.

Most importantly, Axel argues that since 1983 it has been images of thetortured bodies of Sikh ‘militants’ and Khalistanis, which now freely circulateon the internet, that have played a central role in creating the social relationsthat constitute the diaspora. Axel shows that these images remind diasporicSikhs of the constant threat of violence they face and foreground thedislocation, longing for home and struggle for power that are implicit in thediasporic condition.44

But diaspora, Axel’s foundational category, remains a contested term inthe Sikh case. As Dusenbery, McLeod and Karen Leonard have pointed out,the notion of a ‘Sikh diaspora’ may in itself be misleading as it privilegesreligious identity at the expense of other social markers, economic ties, and

43 Verne Dusenbery, ‘A Sikh Diaspora? Contested Identities and Constructed Realities’,Nation and Migration: the Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora Peter van der Veered., (Philadelphia, 1995), 17-42.44 Brian Keith Axel, The Nation's Tortured Body: violence, representation, and theformation of a Sikh “Diaspora” (Durham, NC, 2001).

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kinship networks.45 Dusenbery has demonstrated that diasporic Sikhs are notsimply motivated by projecting a publicly recognizable Sikh identity, butrather manifest concern with maintaining a range of what he terms ‘ancestralgenera’, the linguistic usages, occupational traditions, marriage patterns, andvillage connections that shape Punjabi culture as a whole.46 Not only do wehave to guard against the fetishization of religious identity implicit within thenotion of a ‘Sikh diaspora’, but we also have to be cautious in the concept’schanging analytical purchase across time. While Axel’s work demonstrates thevery real strengths of a diasporic interpretation of Sikh identity formation inthe post-World War II period, both McLeod and Leonard have suggested thatthe concept may be of limited use for work on migration and community-formation amongst Punjabi migrants in the early twentieth century becauseearly Punjabi settlers in Britain, Canada, the United States and Australasia, likemany rural Punjabis, did not necessarily define themselves in terms of theirreligious community. These knotty analytical problems again underscore theways in which both regional context and historical contingency disrupt theeasy creation of new paradigms, reminding us that while concepts such as a‘Sikh diaspora’ are useful heuristic tools, they should be deployed with careand self-reflection.

Towards a New Approach: The Question of ‘Tradition’

Thus far I have presented a schematic ‘map’ of Sikh historiography and havehighlighted some of the major epistemological and methodological difficultiesthat face each of the positions. In the remainder of the essay, I will brieflyelaborate on this critical commentary and sketch the foundations of analternative vision of Sikh history, one that tries to reconnect the pre-colonialpast, colonialism and diaspora. This vision remains rudimentary and is notmeant in any sense to be paradigmatic. Rather, I hope, it will raise a series ofquestions concerning the ways in which we produce knowledge about the pastof Sikh communities and it will highlight some fruitful avenues for futureresearch.

45 Dusenbery, ‘A Sikh Diaspora?’; W. H. McLeod, ‘The First Forty Years of SikhMigration: Problems and Possible Solutions’, The Sikh Diaspora N.G. Barrier and VerneDusenbery eds., 29-48; Karen Leonard, ‘Pioneer Voices from California: Reflections onRace, Religion and Ethnicity’, ibid., 120-140.46 Verne Dusenbery, ‘On the Moral Sensitivities of Sikhs in North America’, DivinePassions: the social construction of emotion in India (Berkeley, 1990), 239-261 and ‘TheSikh Person, the Khalsa Panth, and western Sikh Converts’, Religious Movements andSocial Identity: Volume 4 - Of Boeings and Bullock-carts (Delhi, 1990), 117-135.

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As the foregoing discussion of the notion of a ‘Sikh diaspora’ suggests,an important starting point for re-imagining Sikh history is the assessment ofthe sub-discipline’s existing conceptual vocabulary and the exploration of newanalytical concepts. Given the contentious status of ‘history’ as aninterpretative discipline and the centrality of hermeneutic debates over theinterpretation of sacred texts, historians of Sikhism have paid considerableattention to translation. This has been a particular hallmark of the textualistapproach pioneered by McLeod and much of his work proceeds from theclose analysis and discussion of a particular key term or concept. McLeodfirmly respects linguistic and cultural difference, highlighting the problem oftranslation and has frequently argued that Sikhism, where possible, should beunderstood on its own terms, rather than according to a Judaeo-Christianframework. He has, for example, been a firm advocate of the use of the term‘Panth’ to describe the Sikh community, preferring it to other terms such as‘sect’ or ‘denomination’.47 McLeod has been even-handed in his attentivenessto questions of translation: he is just as concerned with the way in whichEnglish terms are mapped onto Punjabi concepts as he is with the accuraterenderings of Punjabi words into English.

Harjot Oberoi has also paid close attention to this issue, particularly withregards to the origins and use of the term ‘Sikhism’. Drawing upon the workof other historians of South Asian religions, most notably Romila Thapar,Oberoi has highlighted the difficulties in translating the very notion of‘religion’ into the South Asian context (especially before 1900) and thecentrality of the colonial state in fashioning and consolidating ‘religion’ as aconcept in South Asia.48

One term that is in wide currency amongst Sikh historians, however,requires careful scrutiny and that is ‘tradition’. Historians of Sikhism use‘tradition’ as a catchall phrase that describes the textual corpus, practices anddiscourses produced by Sikhs. Yet this term is problematic for two reasons.Firstly, ‘tradition’ frequently stands in contradistinction to modernity,representing the authentic essence of a pre-modern community. Whilehistorians generally see ‘tradition’ as being disrupted, undermined andfrequently supplanted by modernity, in Sikh studies ‘tradition’ is frequentlyused in discussions of the contemporary moment and diasporic communities.49

This is not surprising given the strength of the internalist approach and thetendency to insulate the Sikh past from the transformative power of

47 W. H. McLeod, ‘A Sikh Theology for Modern Times’, Sikh History and Religion in theTwentieth Century J.T. O’Connell et al eds., (Toronto, 1990), 32-43.48 Oberoi, Construction of Religious Boundaries, 1-35; also see Romila Thapar, ‘SyndicatedMoksa?’, Seminar, September 1985, 14-22 and Gunther Sontheimer and Herman Kulkeeds., Hinduism Reconsidered (New Delhi, 1989).49 E.g. Sardar Singh Bhatia and Anand Spencer eds., The Sikh tradition: a continuingreality: essays in history and religion (Patiala, 1999).

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colonialism and migration. The category of ‘tradition’ itself has not beensubject to sustained analysis, even though the work of both Lou Fenech andHarjot Oberoi seems to suggest that the very notion of tradition was itself theproduct of the Singh Sabha movement. Secondly, and following on from this,the use of ‘tradition’ as a concept tends to imagine a homogeneous and strictlyunified community, evacuating the Sikh past of struggle and contestation. Thistendency is partly marked in the scholarship for the pre-colonial era, partlybecause of the predominance of textualist readings of the pre-1849 period: amore sophisticated social and cultural history that attended to pre-colonialsocial differentiation and political struggle would fundamentally transform ourunderstandings of the pre-colonial past in the way that Oberoi revised ourvision of the 1870 to 1930 period.

What I am suggesting here then is to extend our critical interrogation ofthe ways in which concepts such as ‘tradition’ have been produced. The workof Fenech on martyrdom and Oberoi on the Tat Khalsa episteme markimportant starting points for this project, but despite their pioneering workthere are fundamental aspects of the colonial period that require careful re-examination. The cultural values and political pressures that shaped the‘Punjab school’ of colonial administration remain largely unquestioned,reflecting a central unevenness in the scholarship on the colonial period.Thanks to Oberoi, we have a rich anthropological understanding of Punjabiculture under colonialism, but the values and motivations of British actorsremain un-anthropologized.50 As it stands, Sikh historiography is in danger ofreplicating the long-established and pernicious assertion that natives haveculture, while Europeans have history. A two-sided rereading of the colonialperiod, as my discussion of Fox and Cohn above suggests, must also attendcarefully to questions of both power asymmetries and agency, recognising theimportance of long-established community dynamics and the importantreformist and prescriptive literature produced by Sikhs themselves (both in thepre-colonial and colonial periods).

Points of Recognition

One way we might avoid privileging the instrumentality of the colonial state isto delineate what can be termed the ‘points of recognition’ that shaped thecultural terrain of colonial Punjab: those values, ideals, and practices that

50 Two essays mark an important start on this project: Harold Lee, ‘John and HenryLawrence and the origins of Paternalist Rule in the Punjab, 1846-1858’, InternationalJournal of Punjab Studies 2:1 (1995), 65-88 and Brian Caton, ‘Sikh Identity Formation andthe British Rural Ideal, 1880-1930’, Sikh Identity, 175-194. More generally, Clive Deweyhas offered some important insights in his Anglo-Indian Attitudes: the mind of the IndianCivil Service (London, 1993).

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Britons and Sikhs believed that they shared. These points of recognition,especially notions of masculinity and martiality, were spaces where Sikhleaders could win cultural recognition and economic benefits (especiallythrough military service) from the colonial state and where colonial policy inturn could gain purchase, creating new institutions and reshaping culturalpatterns with the aim of shoring up imperial authority.

It is crucial to insist that while these processes constructed and affirmedcross-cultural commensurability, this production of affinity rested on theidentification and marginalisation of other groups who lacked those qualitiesthat Sikhs and Britons supposedly shared. In other words, the production ofsameness also required the production of difference.51 The British celebrationof the ‘manliness’ and ‘warrior ethos’ of Khalsa Sikhs depended upon acomplex series of comparisons made between monotheistic Sikhs andpolytheistic Hindus, the sturdy Punjabi and the effeminate Bengali, the manlymeat eater of the north and the physically weak vegetarians of the Gangeticplains and the south, as well as the almost complete erasure of Sikh womenfrom colonial discourse.

The most crucial shared discursive formation articulated by Tat Khalsareformers and British scholar-administrators was ‘Sikhism in danger’. TheBritish recruiting officer R. W. Falcon expressed this anxiety clearly when henoted the ‘great slackness there is at the present time in taking the pahul(Khalsa initiation rite), very many who call themselves Singhs ... omit to takethe pahul though adopting the surname and keeping some of theobservances.’52 In a similar vein, the missionary Henry Martyn Clark noted inPanjab Notes and Queries that he had encountered a group of seasonal-workers who observed the injunctions of the rahit at home, but would cuttheir hair and openly smoke when they were working away from theirvillages. Surely this was evidence of the decay of Sikhism?53

In short, the British saw their role as the policemen of tradition,installing granthis for Sikh regiments, supplying jhatka meat for Sikh soldiers,and collecting a dense archive of ethnographic information about patterns ofpopular practice. They had to protect Sikhism from the ‘all-consuming jungle’of popular Hinduism.

This brings us to the work of the most important western interpreter ofSikhism before W. H. McLeod, Max Arthur Macauliffe. Macauliffe wasposted to the Punjab as an Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer in 1862 at the age

51 The relationship between affinity and difference in the history of colonialism is criticallyexplored in Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. Special issue: From Orientalismto Ornamentalism: Empire and Difference in History, 3.1 (2002).<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/toc/cch3.1.html>52 R.W. Falcon, Handbook on Sikhs for Regimental Officers (Allahabad: Pioneer Press,1896), 21.53 H.M. Clark, ‘The Decay of Sikhism’, Panjab Notes and Queries, 3 (1885), 20.

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of twenty-five. In 1893 he resigned from the ICS after a distinguished careerin the Punjab administration, serving as a Deputy Commissioner between 1882and 1884 and as a Divisional Judge from 1884. From the mid-1870sMacauliffe became interested in the ethnography and religious history of thePunjab. In 1875 he produced an article in the Calcutta Review on the shrineto Pir Sakhi Sarvar in the Suliman Mountains, which marked the beginning ofa distinguished career, establishing Macauliffe as an important interpreter ofSikh tradition.54

Macauliffe’s The Sikh Religion (six volumes, 1909) created a vision ofSikh scripture and history that has remained tremendously influential withinthe Sikh Panth. Macauliffe insisted that Sikhism was a distinctive religion andthat its history was characterised by a constant battle against Hinduism.Popular Hinduism, he argued, was like a ‘boa constrictor of the Indian forests.... it winds round its opponents, crushes it in its fold, and finally causes it todisappear in its capacious interior.’ Sikhism was threatened with this samefate: ‘the still comparatively young religion is making a vigorous struggle forlife, but its ultimate destruction is...inevitable without state support.’55 Thisargument dovetailed nicely with the agenda of the Tat Khalsa reformersMacauliffe worked closely with, who were proclaiming ‘ham hindu nahin’ (weare not Hindus). The proclamation of a leading Sikh periodical that as a resultof Macauliffe’s translation ‘the promiscuousness in Sikh ideas will vanish, andTat Khalsa will begin to start on a new career’ reveals the closeinterdependence of the two views.56

These shared visions conditioned the British use of military recruitmentas a means of preserving the Khalsa identity. R.W. Falcon’s 1896 recruiter’smanual enshrined this official understanding, suggesting that recruitmentshould be aimed only at those ‘Sikh tribes which supplied converts to Sikhismin the time of Guru Gobind Singh, who in fact formed the Singh people’:more recent converts were to be avoided as they could not be considered‘true Sikh tribes’.57 The ultimate test of ‘Sikh-ness’ was whether an individualmaintained the external symbols of the Khalsa: ‘Singhs, the members of theKhalsa; these are the only Sikhs who are reckoned as true Sikh .... The bestpractical test of a true Sikh is to ascertain whether calling himself a Sikh he 54 M.A. Macauliffe, ‘The Fair at Sakhi Sarvar’, Calcutta Review, LX (1875), 78-101. Formore recent analyses of the worship of Sakhi Sarvar in nineteenth century Punjab see HarjotOberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries 147-160 and ‘The Worship of Pir SakhiSarvar: Illness, Healing and Popular Culture in the Punjab’, Studies in History, 3 (1987), 29-55.55 Macauliffe, Sikh Religion I, lvii. In a similar vein David Petrie praised the colonial statefor ‘buttressing the crumbling edifice of the Sikh religion’ but warned that the maintenanceof a separate Sikh identity was an ongoing project. David Petrie, Recent Developments inSikh Politics, 1900-1911, a Report (Amritsar, 1911), 52.56 Undated excerpt from The Khalsa, Macauliffe, The Sikh Religion, xi.57 Falcon, Handbook on Sikhs 61-2.

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wears uncut hair and abstains from smoking tobacco.’58 The various non-kes-dhari (sahaj-dharis, shaven mona and patit Sikhs) groups who might haveidentified themselves with (elements of) the Sikh tradition were to be avoided.Khalsa Sikhs were ‘true’ Sikhs and Khalsa Sikhs alone could be relied on toexhibit the true values of a warrior. Falcon mapped these martial qualitiesacross the different regions of Punjab, warning officers away from eastern andsouthern regions where the ‘Hindustani type’ was prevalent and against thoseregions where Sikh identity was ‘very diluted by Hinduism’.59 Once recruitedSikh troops were placed in Sikh regiments, kes-dhari Sikhs who were notamrit-dhari were required to undergo the Khalsa’s khande ki pahul initiationrite and all Sikh troops were to maintain the external symbols of their Sikhidentity and to accept the authority of the granthis appointed by the Army toperform Sikh rituals.60 British officers believed that a sensitivity to religiousidentity and the fastidious maintenance of that identity was central to the espritde corps of the Sikh troops and to the general effectiveness of the IndianArmy, a force which was increasingly reliant on the ability and loyalty of itsSikh soldiers.

Thus, rather than ‘making a culture’ (as Fox suggests) the British wereintent on fostering a Khalsa tradition revivified by the new class of educatedand energetic urban reformers driving the Singh Sabha movement. Within thedominant interpretative frameworks deployed by the British, these reformerswere heirs to the reforming spirit that was at the heart of the Sikh tradition.For the British the Sikhs were a product of an ‘Indian Reformation’, which,like the European Reformation, was an ongoing process not some distanthistorical fact. The gains that the Khalsa had made needed to be carefullyguarded, least they be swallowed and destroyed by the relentless pressure ofthe ‘boa constrictor’ of Hinduism.

The Polylogics of Identity at ‘Home’ and ‘Away’

One useful model for making sense of these exchanges comes not fromPunjabi historiography, but from colonial South India. In his excellentDialogue and History, Eugene Irschick insisted that the colonial social orderwas ‘a negotiated, heteroglot construction shaped by both weak and strong,the colonized and colonizer, from the present to the past.’ Irschick’s study ofland tenure in the Madras hinterland traced the interplay between the demands

58 Ibid., 15.59 Ibid., 71-3, 98-102.60 For a first-hand account of this see Vincent Eyre, The Sikh and European Soldiers of OurIndian Forces: A Lecture (London, 1867), 7-8. On the kes-dhari/amrit-dhari distinctionsee W. H. McLeod, Who is a Sikh: the problem of Sikh identity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989),110-115.

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of colonial administrators and the authority of indigenous knowledgetraditions, stressing the ‘dialogic’ nature of British colonial knowledge.61 Hewarned that ‘we can no longer presume’ that British understandings of Indiawere the ‘product of an “imposition” by the hegemonic colonial power onto amindless and subordinate society.’62 Local aspirations and colonial agendaswere in a constant dialogue, a dynamic process of exchange where claim andcounter-claim led each interest group to modify its position almost constantly.

In the Punjabi case, we can perhaps think of the construction ofknowledge and identity as being polylogic rather than dialogic. WhereIrschick’s case study explored the encounter between peasant cultivators and asmall cadre of British officials in the Madras hinterland, the negotiation of Sikhidentity was a more diffuse and open process. Not simply the product of anencounter between coloniser and colonised, the renegotiation of Sikhism wasproduced by contestations within the community as well as encounters withvarious Hindu reformers, Christian missionaries, and colonial officials.Pamphleteers and preachers were aware of the multiplicity of arguments thatthey were responding to and the divergent audiences they were addressing:their texts seem deeply imprinted by these multiple engagements and thenecessity to construct multifaceted arguments suited to heteroglot populationof the region.

This argument for the creation of an approach that explores thecomplex and polylogic negotiation of identity under the uneven powerrelations of colonialism reflects an insistence on the inherent heterogeneity ofPunjabi society. The region’s inherently diverse and hybridised populationreflects the reality that Punjab has long stood at the confluence of the Islamicand Indic worlds and the cultures of Central and South Asia. As a result, theBritish encountered a heterogeneous society in Punjab, a society wherenumerous social groups were differentiated by a range of socio-economic,cultural and political factors. Given this, any search for one representativeSikh, yet alone one representative Punjabi, voice in the colonial archive is futilein the face of the multiplicity of local actors whose pamphlets, speeches andtestimonies survive in British and Punjabi archives. Tracing the inter-relationships between these various Punjabis, establishing points of recognitionand as well as points of conflict between these colonised groups and variousBritish interests, and fighting against the limits of the colonial archive torecover the experiences of under-represented groups (especially tribals, Dalitsand women), will allow us to locate the negotiation of Sikh identity within thedeep structures and complex dynamics of Punjabi life.

More broadly still, this insistence on the polylogic construction ofculture and identity also recognises that Sikhs were incorporated into the 61 Eugene F. Irschick, Dialogue and History: constructing South India, 1795-1895(Berkeley, 1994), 10.62 Ibid., 8.

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British empire and that this imperial system worked as system of mobility,where certain ideas, commodities and people circulated. Sikhs, especially Sikhsoldiers, were conspicuous in this imperial world and the turbaned Sikh soldierbecame one of the most potent imperial symbols. Unfortunately, to date, mostscholarship on the Sikh ‘diaspora’ focuses on Sikh ‘settlers’, those migrantswho left Punjab and established permanent homes in North America, Britain,Europe, Africa, Asia or Australasia. We know much less about ‘sojourners’,those Sikhs who lived outside the Punjab for a short period of time or whotravelled backwards and forwards from Punjab. In part, this lacuna is theproduct of our limited knowledge of the early decades of the diaspora and, inparticular, the absence of work that explores the important connectionsbetween British imperialism and the very genesis of the diaspora in the secondhalf of the nineteenth century. Most of the early Sikhs who ventured outsideSouth Asia did so as soldiers, yet we have little in the way of extended analysisof their experience: the path-breaking work in this area, such as SusanVanKoski’s work on Sikh soldiers in Europe during World War I, is largelydescriptive and offers limited insights into the culture of Sikh military servicebefore 1914.63 Ideally, trans-national histories of Sikhism will grapple with thenineteenth century and allow us to explore the relationships between mobility,fixity and colonialism that are currently being explored by scholars of othercolonised societies.64

Thus, the new vision of modern Sikh historiography that I am gesturingtowards calls into question the rigid divisions commonly drawn between thecolonial period and the age of the diaspora and it highlights the various formsof mobility that have shaped Sikh experiences. It also underlines theimportance of encounters, both within and outside South Asia, in shaping Sikhidentity. Although Kenneth W. Jones and Himadri Banerjee have exploredsome of the important intellectual connections between Bengal and Punjab, westill know relatively little about the experiences of Sikhs living in other parts ofSouth Asia. This leaves significant gaps in our understanding of therelationship between Sikhs and the project of building a national Indian cultureand means that some crucial processes, such as the Punjabization of Delhi,remain largely unexplored.65 Similar questions can be raised about thescholarship on the diaspora, where much work has focused on development ofcommunity institutions and relations with the ‘host’ state, rather than assessing

63 Susan VanKoski, ‘Letters home, 1915-16: Punjabi soldiers reflect on war and life inEurope and their meanings for home and self’, International Journal of Panjab Studies, 2:1(1995), 43-63.64 Most notably Radhika Mongia, ‘Race, nationality, mobility, a history of the passport’,Public Culture 11:3 (1999), 527-56.65 Jones, ‘Ham Hindu Nahin’; Himadri Banerjee, ‘Bengali Perceptions of the Sikhs: theNineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Sikh History and Religion in the Twentieth Century,110-135 and ‘Sikh Identity Question: a view from eastern India’, Sikh Identity 195-216.

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the ways in which Sikh identities have been shaped by daily encounters withnon-Sikhs. Thus much work on the diaspora continues to treat Sikhs as a self-sufficient community insulated from other individuals and collectivities, leavingthe relations between Sikhs and other prominent South Asian diasporiccommunities, such as Gujaratis and Sylhetis, unexplored and the encountersbetween diasporic Sikhs and Asian, Afro-Caribbean and European migrantcommunities uncharted.

Conclusion

In urging a move towards a mobile and transnational history of Sikhism, thispaper encourages historians of Sikhism to increasingly engage with broaderdebates in history, anthropology, sociology and gender studies. This is not tosuggest that Sikh studies should shift its focus from addressing the Panth, butrather it is a call for what we might term ‘Janus-faced’ scholarship, which isattentive both to the historical questions that interest Sikhs and theepistemological, methodological and theoretical debates that animatehumanities scholarship more generally. By recovering the complex culturaltraffic and diverse encounters that have moulded the Panth, such an approachis not only more in keeping with recent directions in cross-culturalhistoriography but also recognises that although the Panth is united by itsdevotion to the Gurus and the Guru Granth Sahib, Sikhs occupy diversecultural locations and articulate a multiplicity of identities. Recognition of thecultural exchanges and hybridised social patterns borne out of the inequalitiesof colonialism and the upheavals of migration necessitate the creation of newhistoriographical visions and forms of practice. With the recent celebration ofthe 300th anniversary of the Khalsa and 150th anniversary of Britishannexation, it now seems a good time to begin to explore the possibilities thatsuch an approach to the Sikh past might offer.